well, this'll hustle a podcast by fun size about mobile product design. I'm your host for today's episode. Daniel Moser, project manager at Fun Size. Rick is at home on paternity leave, probably telling Dad jokes to his very fresh, tiny baby born just a couple days ago. Uh, with us in studio co hosting with Mia's Anthony Armand ears partner, CEO, Awesome guy at fun size, eh? Today's sponsor is Ping board. It's a company culture tool that helps you manage your teams. Learn more about it at their website pin board dot com Today in studio with us, we have some fun friends from photo shop.

It'll be Photoshopped team. We have Brady and set. So what? You guys tell us a little bit about yourself where you're from, how you're doing in Austin. What's going on? Says says, I have to go first. I'm Grady. I'm a product designer on photo shop. Uh, you know what you want to know? Like, where am I from? Like what do you are? Yeah,

What were you from? Where do you hail from? I was born in Portland, but I grew up in the D C area people and I'm gonna in the Bay Area in San Francisco area for about 11 years now. I guess

so. What do you do it, Photoshopping? What did you do before?

Before photo shop? Well, I've been at Adobe for about, uh, four and 1/2 years now, and before that, I was doing design program management inside there, their group. But before I joined the dhobi, I was doing freelance web in graphic design. Lot of WordPress, that kind of thing. I was also home with two tiny babies for a while, so that was doing freelance was a good choice for me for a while. And before that, I was in house web in graphic design for, like,

100 person company that totally was like the definition of big brother was, like, completely creepy. Um, Medea. Now, um, I moved over the photo shop team, and I've been working on photo shopped for about two years, and here I am. Awesome. All right. So that that's Brady Evans. And we also have in studio set Shaw.

So I'm Seth, and they're one of the product designers on foot a shop on, uh, yeah, been then the adobe for three years. now. Um, the past year I spent working on foot of shops and before I was on some smaller and internal projects has actually brought onboard Thio working the head, the creative cloud. What portion of it? Um, for that, like from Ohio originally. And I lives in Portland for a little bit. And then I moved down to the bay area. So yeah, before I started at Adobe, I was doing mostly marketing and digital website design. And in that stuff at a small agency, like fun size, So

also very cool. Thanks, guys. Okay, so today our topic, uh, which you guys brought to us and it really awesome designed that doesn't ship, does it count or And make sure you enunciate ship ship ship, No ship, no ship design. So yeah, alternative title ships or it didn't happen. Um, so, uh I mean, well, before we get into,

that just is a nice record, because we were talking about this a little bit earlier. Um, how do you say, How do you say the plural of you all? Because down here in Texas, it is y'all and I I'll start because mine's less interesting. I actually enjoy saying y'all and sometimes I'll just say you owe I

like how they said in Philly,

youse guys, he was guys, this guy is good. That's good. So I

switched it up between the ends and y'all being being from like Western in eastern Ohio.

Can't say yen's What does that even mean? How do you spell gins?

Why there? There's a couple ways like you do Why I owe you an us or you could do Why I n z

is that like your village? It like I can look that up in the dictionary and says,

Yen's You just kind of kind of start compressing.

Is it somehow? Really? It's like the unions, because I've heard no completely different you. You you once, you once, you, you many onions, unnatural people in cold Shut it really users. That's a sweet me, huh? Fun. Cool. Great. Thank you. Could I speaking all right. So let's get into it.

Uh, Brady, I understand you have some strong opinions about design that hasn't seen the light of day. I can Can I open this up? So this kind of conversation, uh, kind of revolves around the dilemma that there's a lot of great looking design on the Web sites like Be Hands and Dribble. You get these like, amazing looking shots of conceptual design that doesn't actually exist anywhere, that you can touch it or interact with it. So, Brady, why don't you kick us off and give your opinions on those? So what? I'm not as dog. It's fun to be dogmatic.

It's like what the Internet is built on, right is extreme dogmatism. But I'm not actually completely done. I think it's important. I just want to say before I say what I actually think. I mean, I think this too, but it's important that people get to play, you know, play playful, you know, solo storming our, you know, designing for your your own thoughts. I work. I have a whole sketchbook.

Obviously none of that is shipped like I draw a lot. I I dropped in photo shop a lot. I get ideas that way, but they are in nascent. And so what? You you know when you work on a project that is as front and center is something like photo shop is, you know, people throw over some redesigns, for instance you know, like a fixed it. You fixed photo shopped for you. There you go. Problem solved, all say, And even internally, we have.

You know, stuff like that happens. You know, it's it's a spa. It's a doggie competitive design world in there. And so often times you know you'll end up in conversations where you know why. Why this or why that Or why can't you reorder this or, you know? And there's there's really technical constraints on the engineering side with a 25 year old project. And then there's huge constraints would just start with constraints before we move on to the other important stuff. There's huge constraints, Um, because we have 25 years worth of pre existing users. And, you know, it's as important for them to know where things are going to continue to be as it is for us to continue to make them better.

Um, and so So there's all that. And then there's the whole act of what happens when you're when you're designing within constraints. And then there's the whole act of what happens when you take your designs and you start actually putting them in front of people. And so, like my favorite my undergraduate degrees in neuroscience, and my favorite thing to do is is to do user centered design and to actually have have the design change and to be wrong and have, like the like. I love being wrong. E. I never am right. So the the one day I'm actually right. I'll probably freak out. Um, but I think that actually makes better design. And I think you know,

people like my dogmatism doesn't Actually, I'm not all the way out there like, oh, the trivialization of design. And I don't freak out about that stuff because, like I said, I think it's important to play and it's it's delicious and it keeps me motivated. It's fun to go and thinking a corner about this stuff, but it gets so like that's, you know, what is that like? 3% of the actual act of designing a product is when you're putting pixels on a screen, and it's the part that we that's the part that the light gets shown on. And the light doesn't get shown on like the ethnographic work that Charles is doing. And it doesn't get shown on, like the the long,

long conversations that we have internally with engineering to get around corners and the the the long extrapolated sales isn't even the right word. It's, you know, getting everybody be behind the direction so that they understand that the direction was not something you just cooked up and threw up on dribble. It was something that was informed by a whole bunch of other data on like, Here's the direction we're moving and there's there's a current livewire that we're dealing with on the photo shop team right now. That's just like that. It's gonna take, you know, 78 e mails and, you know, 15 direct person in person conversations for us to get a little decision made. But if that was important and that

was designed, I think a lot of people, you know, that throw these like redesigns over the fence. You know, playing is one thing, but when you're actually proposing as another because you're also discounting the the amount of hard work like you said that that team took to get there and all the corporate challenges and limitation to the top technology, for example, life, I only experience this like like three years ago, when I went from agency to work in house had ever known trying to evolve the design of the Evernote product. But almost everything that we really wanted to do was limited by the fact that their sink engine just couldn't do what we wanted to do. And you know that experience for me to like. I understand that a little bit deeper and in terms of like hiring designers, especially the product world like Siri aesthetics are great. But I want people that think about the system that they're thinking more holistically. I mean,

it's a lot easier to train someone howto style isa layer. It's a lot harder to train someone howto work with multiple constituents and solve big problems and think, think, think high level. I say that like the wind benefit of, like a triple ization and unsolicited redesigns. You know, when people focus on that, uh, they tend to focus on like that. What if so, you push things further instead of starting off, say was safe. I'm from working on new feature for a photo shop, for instance, so new the constraints on what were able to d'oh.

So I'm going to start there instead of going like crazy. Like, you know, this is our time frame. I know what we can ship in this time frame, but if they someone redesigns the whole interface and they just go, Whoa, What if, like, what? If we could do this and this and this and this, you start there and you can start paring it down. Seeking started a very radical level in an Easter building in the business constraints soon, but actually

ships, you mean anything that's totally fair and important is that, you know, I think most of this stuff on dribble, you know, because of the format it's not. It's not usually that kind of thinking, but we're dribble aside like not talking about dribble. I totally think that it's important to do what you just said, Seth, which is like to be able Thio, put down all of the garbage every once in a while and think big because you need that to, like, stay alive on the inside. You're going to be like there's there's hope out in the future and his magic like That's how Project Recess got started. As a matter of fact, you know,

like we were so fed up with dealing with the constraints of the U. R E as it currently stands on photo shop in it. And the the constraints of the existing architecture as it actually stands were like, Well, what if we just shut all that off and got to start

over? Do you want to tell Our listeners are just a little bit about project recess for those that make me. We don't know what you can say about it anyway.

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it's you know, that that part of the cat's out of the bag so we can talk about that. Basically, the project recess is the idea of separating the core engine and architecture, say that canvas from photo shop and then shutting down the U I that you know. So basically silencing it and then building over on top of that through a somewhat complicated communication layer in the middle. But building a whole you I and experience and I say experience, not just you, I on top of it from html CSS and JavaScript. And the cool thing about that is that, like when we were first doing our first prototypes of like, well, could we do this, we pull this off.

One of the first things we did was we made in blue pencil tool. So every time you click this button, we set the color to blue. We select this pencil, uh, tool preset. And we created a new layer called Blue Pencil. That means, you know, if you think about it like you can do anything that way, it doesn't have to be in the constraints of the tools that we know them today. And then that just sort of blew the whole thing wide open, and we could start. So project recess on this platform is basically the first experiment on that architecture. And it is a design space built on top of Photoshopped or over. But it's it's not just the u I.

That's important. Little note. Yeah. Um, yeah, for the listeners who don't know, we just got a demo of project recess today, and it's a really amazing feature. We're really looking forward to testing it further with y'all. Y'all Y'all Yeah. Been really looking forward to testing it with the INS. Cool. Well, um I mean, I think we went through, uh,

pretty well, sort of. Both sides of that issue. So, um, let's go through. Sort of a real world scenario. Unless Anthony, you have more to talk about on that subject, I have a lot to you. Okay. I can go for days, Uh, with real world examples. Yeah. Yeah,

Well, maybe lipstick in your scenario. And, uh, we'll see what else we can come up with. So the scenario question is, Well, so you're hosting an interview for a design position that's opened up at Adobe Photoshopped. You meet with two designers. The first has a really incredible, aesthetically advanced, very adventurous portfolio. Um, maybe even an impressive following online with different channels. But the designs aren't fully reflective of products that have ever seen the light of day or that have shipped. Um,

the second designer has an underwhelming, almost conservative or boring portfolio. A smattering of followers online, but really small. Um, yet she has solid experience. Shipping products like it. Okay, Both are. She's for this scenario. Um, and, uh, so I guess talk about who you would hire and be sure to keep it 100 as they say, as the Children say. What does that mean?

Keeping 100 it's keeping it 100%. I learned about this on the Weary William Show. Actually, it means being totally truthful, like keeping keeping your answers 100% real, staying under cereal. Okay, so keep it. Keep it 100. I wouldn't know enough. Based on portfolios. I mean, I the best interview that I've ever been to for product design. They had me do a project that is the best way for me to know who to hire. So I I haven't actually done this yet. I'm someday when I hire people do this,

but put together, you know, a constraint, probably a a project that has previously existed on photo shop. Be like All right, you know, here's let's just say art boards. Let's say we were gonna put our boards and Photoshopped hypothetically, I say, All right, how you are the product designer for a feature called Art Boards and Photoshopped. What would you do? And they would ask me, I'm sure some questions like What do you mean? Like those questions would be so telling if there were questions like, you know,

if they just started drawing something that would be very telling us this is not. It's not. Unless it was, they started drawing boxes and arrows and might. I might be interested. And if they started asking me like who's on the team? What are the personality like, you know, like, what's the time frame? You know, what are if they stay? Those questions would tell me a lot about how they problem solved, and that's what I would be looking for. So some portfolios are actually really good at articulating this, and some are terrible like it, portfolios that look at the process I am much more drawn

to The challenging thing about a visual design portfolio is that you also don't know what they actually did. You have to get down to the root of like, Were they single designer? Did someone give them wire frames? Was that a group project? Did they do conceptual design and all the you know, like what exactly were they responsible for? Because, you know, and I look a TTE portfolios all the time. I don't wanna interview whole lot here at fun size, but when I was never know, we looked at hundreds of portfolios and way would see the same design work and multiple people's perfectly right. So the first thing is like, Is this person a liar? Right. And then it's kind of,

you know, for me, it's figuring out, Well, how did they think are they, um, old school designer, that thinks that someone is doing wire frames and handing it to them and they wanna make them pretty? Are they the kind of person that wants to do all of it? I also like test. I know a lot of people don't like the test thing, but you can get a lot of really interesting things from that. Ever note. We had a simple test sketch us a mechanism to tag a note because in that test we would know immediately if they understood even modern paradigms and we would see if they would, like, propose something that was actually doable or something that's more conceptual.

But you so, like when you when you actually proposed thes tests, was it a future that was brand new? Like, uh, you guys have been thinking about for a long time, or is it something that will kind of existed? Wouldn't you just be modifying with this particular test? It's actually if you know. It's like the core feature of Evernote tagging we want. It was a test of first to make sure that they understood whatever note does. And it was also a test to kind of see if they understood, like, just basic tagging paradigms. So just like drunk, like one

of the things like like literally when you say Tagi tagging paradigms, you mean literally the token ization paradigm?

Yeah, just, you know, like we would say, Okay, photo sharing out. You have an image

to live. Do you live under a rock? Was part of it.

Show me. Show me the pattern for doing tags. And some people would do like what you would expect like a very modern approach. Will you just type in the tag? And if there's one that already exists, you click that some people would like Oh, you go to the menu and Ugo tag And like,

you actually had people that that failed that test In a way, I guess that's a good weed out.

Yeah, that the reason why I brought it up If it was something guys we're focusing on versus something like improving something that already existed, so must feel like in the past when I've had to do the stuff interviewing for companies. Sometimes it almost felt like they were getting free work. You know, I don't like younger design. Younger designers. They're applying for companies in the S O. Will you redesign this portion of our applications? So here's the problem. And so it almost feels like, you know, doing that, you know, doing say they have 10 people interviewing for a position. So they have 10 different solutions that they're gonna be like, you know,

like, here's 10 different ideas. Oh, no. We just make him do that on the white board, right in front of us. Well, I'm not like, take home. Don't, like, almost take home homework quite often. Do you guys do that? Like, do you guys do tests? And if you do, do you pay people for the work?

We We don't do tests. I know that, but the, um, the last hiring cycle that I was a part of I have, you know, each participant like when it was perfectly organized. These participant was responsible for evaluating a certain segment of the interview process. So you know this persons in charge of cultural fit and this persons in charge of figuring out if they understand. And it was up to that person to figure out how to structure that part of the interview. But I'm not sure I'm not sure that we've cracked the code where where we work personally. But that that place that I went on that interview with a while back that had they had me dio like, don't spend any more than an hour. But here's ah, here's a design and app for 1000 person company who needs to find and book meeting rooms. And so when when they said that's all the guidance given their like it could just be sketches. It could be just pencils on paper.

But design and up don't spend more than an hour. So then what happens right is that you have to think about a problem. You have to explain. You know, the information you don't have. You have to say, Well, I'm assuming the following things, but I not knowing those things I'm gonna just use this is scratched data for that. And you know, So you got that. And then I met another person who was like, Okay, since we're a full, You know, what we do here is product design.

Like I need to know that you know how to talk with customers. And so I had to do an interview with someone like All right, pretend this is an app. It's that was actually Redfin. Show me how you would talk to me about you interview me about your app like I'm a year user research for this up, which I thought was also really important. Because you if if you can't do that kind of work to me, you have no business designing interface like being ableto interview users and get information and feedback from users that is actionable is super important. And then the last thing they had had me do was designed something on the fly which I thought was also telling similar to your test thing. And, you know, it was a pretty simple It was totally like the gut check thing, like, OK, do you know what attack? Right. But that's is a nice, rounded way to look at things. It's not a visual portfolio, right?

This this landscape is just so different to you know, because three years ago I think there was a lot of people, at least that I knew that were to come from the Web design inside or like eight or agency art directors, and their minds were a completely different places than the needs of a product company. And, you know, I know I know that this is different in San Francisco, where you guys are. But here in Austin, there's our community of product design. Product designers is still growing, so I kind of look at that, too, like Okay, well, maybe get a great visual designer if they seem to possess the desire to want to think systematically on, they can do and they prove it could do good work.

I see that theory to prove them, or if they're a great interaction designer, that that can do great mock ups. I look at that, too. Not everyone has equal skill set, you know, like I think it's kind of you can't expect everyone to be able to be excel at all these. You know, we even have several. We have a couple of designers here that are kind of like something heavy weighted on conceptual design versus interaction design. But yeah, and I think you kind of have to me. I think the best test if we're on that topic is really just someone to work for, you know, on a contractor or something

that that is totally what the end of that. If I had moved forward with that company, they would have done a contract before they did hire. That's that's awesome that you guys do it that way. I find it fascinating because we revisit a lot as Photoshopped designers revisit a lot of design companies. So we are agencies we've been. We've been print Pinterest in the square Facebook. We looked around and it's interesting to me. And I'd love to know more about what you guys do in terms of like hiring the full stack designer, you know, like at Square it's it's still very, you know, maybe they've changed. So not I want to speak out of school. But when I was there, there were visual designers. They were front end designers,

you know, there were production designers that was just like little tiny, a little tiny bit with jobs, whereas Pinterest is still sort of full stock product design. Were you? You're responsible for your whole future soup to nuts. What's it? I don't know. What's it? Like it? Ever? No, I don't do

well at ever note. It was, You know, we had to product designers that we're working on one product we're working on Skitch. But we were supporting a A platforms in parallel. So I I found iPad Android Mobile Android tablet when 32 desktop Mac desktop went the whole thing. So that was actually really challenging because, you know, you know, for each platform had four engineers to dedicated que engineers, but only two designers for everything. Uh, you know, with fun size, we knew when we started this company that we didn't want to be a big agency, and we wanted to keep our price prices down enough that we could work with early stage in mid stage tech companies. But we also I knew that we needed to future proof our company.

So we kind of the way we talk about it is just in the T shaped model. Like we expect all of our designers to be generally versed and user centered. Design, interaction, design, information, architecture, you know, conceptual design, visual design, implementation design way. Don't do any technology here at all, not even any friend and development work. But like I said, like everyone is, everyone in that T shape is gonna be different.

Some people are gonna be stronger and others, but it's really important for us because our teams are two or three people. It's important for those three team members, whether you know, are able to all equally contribute in some way. So sometimes we have to piece the right people together if it's a very unique project. But most the time everyone can support each other. If there's if there's one area, what, someone stronger in another.

But it's cool. Yeah, we're just gonna look at Seth and go yens, okay?

It's important to be a jack of all trades, so I know that's that's unimportant. You know, when we look for people at Adobe like for like in time, I was hiring for hired Um yeah, the director who hired me, you know, that's like one of the things he said. That's what they look for individuals. So I think the character and like, you know, just there at the personality, whether they give up easily, you know, like the the pursuit of knowledge. You know, like the problem solving and your desire to actually sit down and think about stuff, you know, So

cool. Yeah, that's awesome. Brady, you went a little bit into, um you know, if the candidate you know, you present them with a thing are, uh, speck or something, and you tell the, you know, that them asking you questions is very indicative of you know, what they're gonna be like to work with and how their skills. Well, what are some other things you notice about candidates when you present them with, you know,

well, district in full transparency. I have not hired anyone. I don't think so. This is all fairly hypothetical. Yeah, but if ins I were hiring if ins Yoon's yens ones weren't wanted me to do some hiring, um, I think one of this one And since you've done a lot of hiring, this is fun because I can, like, pretends. One of the things I worry about, which might be a different way of looking at your question is lack of any questions because I think, you know, we we live in a very youthful culture.

We celebrate youth a lot we hire young. I think youth is extremely important, But with youth often comes a lack of winds wisdom. And I think some and I would I would love to hire more young people. Just for the record, we could mean a lot more young people in X t. I am way too old, but I want I want to hire people who understand that they may not know what they do not know. And that's really important, because I think you know, it's also interesting because I'll just flip flip that coin a little bit, too something Seth said earlier about, you know, getting rid of all the constraint, sometimes hiring people that do not know what they do not know is glorious because they just like wrecking ball straight into something that you would have never gone into. So So maybe what I'm I would want to look for is a combination of humility and complete balls,

Penis like, because there's a phrase I've been really fond of late leads and I don't know, I gotta figure out who the actual quote person I need to give credit where this is, do it because it's not my quote, but strong opinions loosely held e think that's what I want to hire. I would hire for, like, I want you to have an opinion on these things. But I want you to have, like, the the self awareness to know that you could be wrong. And when you're wrong, you're gonna let it go, like back off. Yeah, that's that is a hard personality type defying. Yeah,

that's like are like a humility. It's like, no one of our company values, you know? I mean that to me, that's more important than any skill. The right person that shows that that can be taught, you know, they have that ability in strong opinions too, right? I mean, I agree with that. I'm gonna look up that quote as well.

Yeah, I mean, without naming any names, a client is always a good start. Yeah, Yeah, a client from way back our way in the future. You don't know what time period I'm talking about? Um uh, there cos structured in such a way that it just it seemed like it was really hard to get anything done because there were a lot of strong opinions and nobody really knew who was in charge and nobody was really making the call. So, um, yeah, just a lot of wrecking balls. Not a lot of yet lying down, I think. E give that a lot of thought to we hire,

I think really well in in our organization for those types of people like we I think we want these. We think we want these wrecking ball personalities. But at some point, you need have a mix, right, like and I enter in terms. I give this a lot of thought, but I don't have Ah, a really cogent I haven't even cracked the code yet, but I feel like the team, the whole of the team is really important. Like you don't want to hire all of the same. I like it. You know, you need the zeitgeist like, you know,

just like one of my favorite things about working on photo shop is when we actually get to execute with the small, multi multi disciplinary team where everybody's working together to solve a problem. There's engineering represented, there's product management represented, there's design represented, and we are all I mean, we we disagree, and that's totally fair. But there's mutual respect and and and the personality types like that mix like I've had it in fleeting moments where I was like, Ah, like one of the things I did it Adobe, before I worked on photo Shop, was try to build on entrepreneurship program inside of Adobe. And the whole premise was we're gonna take one Dev one designer, one engineer and one researcher and we're goingto make this little this team that's going to get out in front of other stuff with no constraints. And the first team that we put together was was glorious.

We just had, like, ideas upon ideas, and we we learned a whole lot. We threw a whole bunch of stuff away. So we tried to create another team and we just took who was around like, who was free to build the other team and completely failed the same model. Same expectations, same format, same freedom, different people. Totally. The second team just sucked. That's a strong word. They didn't suck. It didn't work the same way.

The first teamwork, right? Uh, yeah, the dynamics were off. I don't know how you Maybe when you run a company that small and like funds as you get to, like, lovingly curate that,

Yeah, it's a lot easier to do that. And we, you know, we can rotate people in a certain way around. Projects of the clients get to work with almost everyone, and our designers get to touch a lot of different projects. You know, it's it's a luxury that we have. It's really hard, you know, Due to do that, I'm sure that photo shop window you know, there's all these teams that you guys have, the things you're working are so big and it's Photoshopped. But yeah, we can't curated a little bit.

Yeah, and I would say to Our benefit is, well, usually our clients are liking. Then he said earlier early stage startups, the design, at least initially, is fairly low stakes. You know, if we change something initially, you were not gonna have 10,000 angry e mails from NASA telling us that this one teacher change ruined a launch or something. So

but I love working with this product managers there also the same way like fearless to remove the future, but still have humility and still are talking to the customers. But aren't scared to take something away to push it in the right direction.

Yeah. I mean, that is kind of the glory of playground. It removes that it lets us be fearless because we can leave everyone who wants to be left alone alone and change things only for the people who want things drastically changed,

Which is kind of fun. Um, I have one question, uh, you know, going back to the, um, projects that don't ship. I'm sure it's the same in a photo shop, but I'll ask you here after I finish the sentence. But at ever know we designed so many things that never shipped, and a lot of them were, like, really good ideas for, like, separate products. Some of them are really good ideas for features.

Somewhere really good is for redesigns. And some of them were just experimental stuff. And even though most like most of them didn't ship, it seemed like from a broad spectrum. Some of those things gave us inspiration to do something that did ship. And so, you know, like Facebook has these conferences that they do. They talk about their failures, right? But I think it's all it could be almost kind of looked at the other way, like the things that we didn't finish. But you didn't ship its

seeds Seeds for future

innovation. Have you guys worked? Like, what can you say about in your team? Like, how many things have you worked on? The didn't ship that well before I Before I started working on foot of shops open and for three years. So there's two years of my time at Adobe where I worked on stuff that hasn't made it out the door. So I have a lot of a lot of experience in this room, and so that's like, two or three projects I worked on internally that haven't seen the light of day get or never will. Um so

But some of that stuff is actually going to see the light of day now, right under different cover. Wrong sort

of, right? Yeah. Um, yeah, but, you know, like a lot of that is just internal learning, you know, like, what can we take from these projects of kinship and apply those teams or, you know, other projects. So it's kind of like it's almost like we have them on our computer on her stored up in the cloud and then think when another team has a question about something we can share that just pull it out of storage. Look, we fought about this problem three years ago, and here's all the solutions that we have for this. So you guys don't need to think about those phases of the project.

Oh, my God. One of the hardest things about working on photo shop is that, you know, we were we talked to people so often, and we've we get excited about solving all manner of problems. So we have, like, this huge, huge cloud file in the cloud filled with folders of stuff that is ostensibly still active, and someone from another part of the company would come over. I have got this idea for you. It is awesome. And they're like, I'm like up Uh huh. And they tell me their idea like that. Uh huh.

Go back to the humility. But you just have to be like, yeah, especially when users customers tell us, like, you know, like this, You fix this and it's just like, you know, like on you gotta you gotta be a punching bag and take it because it's it'll really stress, like at least on footage up. It can be stressful. So as designers like that that that living in that space of working on things that are purely conceptual or things that don't ship like there was a I overheard a couple designers of fun size the other day talking about a very high profile client of ours that the work was all conceptual. It was more work like, Where is this company going right? Versus almost everything else that we work on that actually gets built. And I think most there's a big group were probably divided in half,

50% of us that want to be connected to things that hit the market and the people are using and working on things that are always gonna be experimental. But those things that like that you worked on, are these some of these things that never go live like. I think it has an effect on designers sometimes, especially at this other interview process, because I've been like sometimes when I'm being interviewed by potential clients, sometimes the first question they asked me is how many things have you shipped that air in the APP store that I could look at right now, and they'll look at it and they'll evaluate it on the spot in the meeting. And so I think that's a similar scenario that designers sometimes have because some of the conceptual things that they did they can't talk about. Yeah, Show

said. Says he's probably got a lot to say. E i e Yeah, yeah, I know that there's so many of those one things, but but to your earlier point, a lot of So this is there's a good in the bad about the stuff that gets mothballed or doesn't shipper doesn't go out the door. A inspires you to like that, that whatever nugget will somehow feed in future work, right? It'll always be there like theirs. There was something I talked about earlier in our demo that I can't talk about right now. That is totally one of those things. I'm so excited to work on it, but I'm not going to go to work on it for, like, your if,

if ever, I might have to hand off all the designs to Seth or to somebody else, Not that they're fully baked or anything but that that's the good part. But then I feel like there's like, this bad part two where I have met designers who they think maybe they did. I'm not saying he didn't crack a code there like I have this clean idea and they didn't want it and they didn't want it. And I'm gonna keep it. And the next time I see a nail, I'm gonna hit it with this hammer. And so I wonder, Has that ever happened to you or your like have this like, I really want to try like this inverted screw ll seeing with like like, how much of the I don't know how much. There's a couple of people I've met who who keep bringing up the same ideas. And I worry about being becoming one of them because I'm like, I have this. I have this idea and I think it would be really awesome, and I just need to figure out how to stuff it in something.

I, um I've experienced that a lot in the past haven't really experienced that too much with this group, but I did have experienced something similar where people are are down because the the design there. Their whole design wasn't the wasn't able to be implemented in, like, a dot exe release.

You mean that completely like

so you know, And I think, you know, And that's a part That's one of the struggles with the younger designers because they don't necessarily understand that this big design vision will take multiple releases to get there. So I guess going back to the interview question probably want the next time interview up someone, probably. We'll see if they understand how this design can get broken down into this and how that shit over it

a lot. That is a super good skill, you know, like a lot of I don't know how to interview for that either. But I want to figure it out, because if you have got this huge vision and you're and they're like, yes, I love that. But now how do we break it out? You know, like what or what? What little thing can we do here that's gonna set us up really well for these and I don't I do not know how to test for that, but that would be really, really awesome.

That's the biggest challenge I've seen with, like, traditional designers and bringing him to this base because they're used to, like, mapping out the whole art direction in this building the product, right? And then they don't know if it fails or not versus like, living in this incremental enhancement world. I think we all live in,

By the way. I just thought you should know this because you said you had two designers on Skitch.

Well, my brother and I used to work there. This was before. This is before fund says

was started. Right? But you had two designers on sketches. You and your brother only to that circle. We have two designers on Photoshopped. Yeah, Okay. 57

Engineer. Okay. Explain. 67 years. Three or four teams,

eight teams. But there's a eight total scum teams. If you want to make it sound, it's awful. It's possible,

huh? How many? Cute.

The engineers. A cute, cute is was including the 60. Wow.

Well, yeah, and I don't think a lot of people understand that, you know, like they you know, you're gonna be on a small team and working with bigger team,

and yeah, and that's another one of things like if you were gonna hire somebody else to work on photo shop, I mean, we completely lucked out with Seth. He was like, awesome. But

for the shop ships, I think that was actually one of the selling points was go. We'll definitely get your stuff

up in the world. But the hard part, I mean, the heart one of the hardest parts for me is that, you know, I am happiest when I'm working on the small multi. If I'm designing, if I'm not just managing, you know, program or something that I wanna work with, like, 5 to 6 people, maybe seven, maybe 10 at the max, you know, like, yeah,

if I'm working on something and but if I, uh but but working across teams, where you there's an engineer on photo shop actually called it drive by design, make me cry like tears came out of my eyes like that's the worst. You don't want to do a job by design because, you know, that's just that's

yeah, e mean, being able to kind of tell Okay, what should be focusing on this week and, you know, being with prioritize your duties for the week just sitting down to be like, Okay, I need to do this for these, this engineering group and then, you know, like, so this gonna hold off. So even though people are pestering, you are asking for stuff like Okay, now, I gotta just focus on this for a day, so I mean, that's that's pretty important in our little,

so Yeah. Yeah. Well, you guys, we have covered an awesome amount of stuff today. It has been such a pleasure having you guys in office this week, Um, and getting to meet you guys and see that awesome demo today. Thank you so much for having as we had such fun. You guys, you're the best

you guys gonna be. You guys are gonna be at the party, right? So when we close up here,

we're gonna go the we're gonna party like crazy. Time to drink time, Time to do South by. Right. So, um, Brady, how can people find you on Twitter? I am at Brady. That's B r a D E. Doc. I'm Brady. Just Brady. Oh, my God have dot com. I have. I have my own domain also,

but I haven't. There's nothing on there hasn't been anything on brady dot com photo shit. Nice and said, How can people follow you just at Seth Shaw? Nice. Exactly how it sounds. Excellent. Well, uh, Anthony, how can people find you?

People can find me at Manta Juan on Twitter m A n t WN and fun sized dot co

and at funds Eyes on Twitter Way locked That was down. I am Danielle of your temp post this week. You can find me at at Daniel Moser, Um and, uh, feel free to tweet at fun size. If you want to request topics or just respond to this episode and be sure to rate the hustle podcast on iTunes and that's of spread button because we love to see that. So thanks again, Photoshopped Team back out next time. Today's episode is brought to you by Ping Board on Employee Directory That will supercharge your team. Today's best companies use paying board to help their growing team continue

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